Rita Ora does it her way

﻿Rita Ora has a recurring dream. Actually,
it's more of a nightmare. She's standing on top of a tower in the
middle of a city - right on the edge of the roof - and there's a
street down below and she's looking out. Suddenly the building
becomes squishy like a sponge. She loses her balance. She thinks
she's about to fall. And right before she does, she wakes up.

When you're 21 and, in the space of two years, you've gone from
gigging at your father's (occasionally empty) pub in London's
Kilburn to signing with Jay-Z's label Roc Nation, touring with Coldplay, and notching up a UK number one
single (R.I.P., an effusion of rasping synth and thundering
breakbeat, written by Drake and featuring Tinie Tempah), stardom must feel unnervingly
fragile. Not long ago she still called a Notting Hill council
estate home. "I shared a room with my sister and I had to not make
a noise when she was sleeping," she says. "Now I have my own place
it's like - I don't even have to be quiet!"

Today, on a splendid mid-June afternoon, Ora, whose look is
somewhere between Beyoncé and Marilyn Monroe, is sitting on a Bauhaus-style
sofa in a north-west London photo studio. Her lips are pouty, her
fingernails sparkly, and you wouldn't know she only got four hours
sleep after flying in yesterday - until her debut album drops in
September the music-industry machine will be a demanding mistress.
The record is called Ora: "It's my name but also
ora in my language means 'time', and it took me so
long to do this album. Like three years."

In a way, its roots stretch back even further. When Ora was a
one-year-old, her parents fled Kosovo, where the singer was born,
after Milosevic began persecuting ethnic Albanians. But she still
has relatives over there. "My grandma told me some really terrible
stories. One time soldiers came and knocked down her door and
pointed guns at their heads and told them to get out of their
house." Now that Kosovo is independent, she wants to represent the
newborn country.

Fame itself was never the driving force: in 2009, she pulled out
of the U.K. Eurovision auditions. "I didn't feel like it was
right," she says. "I thought if I go down that route, I'm going to
have a lot of voices that are going to control me." Roc Nation's
approaching her later that year - after an A&R person heard her
in a bar - was a welcome vindication. She immediately sent Jay-Z a track that she had made herself on a
computer and, in return, she got an invitation to his New York
office to meet the man who would become her boss and mentor. "The
best advice he gave me was, 'Have you ever seen Chris Martin
perform? You know it's literally just him on a stage? And he just
rocks it out'," she recalls. "Jay told me, 'You don't need dancers
and stuff around you on stage.'"

It's not all work, though, as her music attests. Take the track
"How We Do (Party)", which recommends Jack Daniels as a hangover
cure. "I don't literally take a shot of jack in the morning. I mean
I have once. I have a few times. But it's not like I do it all the
time."

Inevitably, Ora is burdened with comparisons to her label-mate
Rihanna. "Although I kind of see the
resemblance a bit, like, in the face," she says. "And if she's
beautiful, you know 'look-wise' then, yeah, O.K., I'm beautiful
too." She concedes it coyly, but it's not an epiphany. Just ask her
about the tattoo on the inside of her left arm. It's a picture of
Aphrodite clutching a heart, she explains. Of all the characters in
Greek mythology, it's the one with whom she most identifies. "She
infatuated a lot of gods with love," Ora says. "She's the Marilyn
Monroe of goddesses."